A Rwandan former intelligence chief, whose legal team is led by the wife of British former Prime Minister Tony Blair, has been freed after a court in the United Kingdom refused to extradite him to Spain to face war crimes charges. General Emmanuel Karenzi Karake, 54, was the most senior intelligence official in the administration of Rwandan President Paul Kagame. He rose to fame as a commander in the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), an armed rebel group from Rwanda’s minority Tutsi tribe that fought to end the genocide inflicted upon the Tutsis by their rival Hutus. In 1994, following the death of nearly a million people, the RPF took power in Rwanda and ended the slaughter. That accomplishment caused a rapid upsurge in the popularity of Karake and other senior RPF leaders. Karake’s popularity remains strong among the Tutsis despite his dramatic falling-out with Kagame in 2010, which led to the general’s dismissal from the government.

Critics, including groups like Human Rights Watch, have accused the Kagame government of instigating mass reprisals after assuming power in Rwanda, including mass murders of Hutus and other tribal members. In 2008, the Spanish government issued an arrest warrant for Karake, accusing him of having participated in “crimes of terrorism” and “war crimes” directed against civilians. Of particular interest to the Spanish authorities was Karake’s alleged participation in the 1997 killing of three Spanish citizens, who were in Rwanda as part of an outreach effort by Spanish medical charity Médicos del Mundo. The former RPF intelligence chief is also accused of having authorized the killing of six more Spanish citizens in Rwanda in the mid-1990s.

Karake was arrested in late June at London’s Heathrow International Airport on a European Arrest Warrant stemming from the Spanish indictment. Shortly afterwards he was granted bail pending extradition proceedings. But the case was dismissed on Monday, following an early morning hearing at the Westminster Magistrates Court in the British capital. According to the British Crown Prosecution Service, the Spanish extradition request was thrown out because the law did not permit UK authorities to hear offences committed abroad by non-British nationals. Karake was then able to leave the court, cheered by many of his supporters who were demonstrating outside.

It is worth pointing out that the Rwandan general was represented in Britain by an international law firm called Omnia Strategy, which was founded by Cherie Blair, wife of British former Prime Minister Tony Blair. It has been reported that Mrs Blair also led General Karake’s legal team in London.

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org
Does the Ebola epidemic present militant groups, such as the Islamic State or al-Qaeda, with the opportunity to weaponize viruses and direct them against Western targets? Earlier this month, United States Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson dismissed in strong terms the possibility that Ebola would be used by Islamic State militants to attack American targets. Speaking to the Association of the United States Army, Johnson acknowledged that the Islamic State is a “very, very dangerous terrorist organization”, but added that his Department had seen “no specific credible evidence that [the Islamic State] is attempting to use any sort of disease or virus to attack” the US. A few days earlier, however, Forbes magazine had quoted Al Shimkus, Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College, as saying that the Ebola outbreak presented Islamist groups with the opportunity to use a low-tech bioterrorist weapon “to attempt to wreak strategic global infection”. Shimkus added that a group like the Islamic State wouldn’t even have to weaponize the virus’ it could “simply use human carriers to intentionally infect themselves in West Africa, then disseminate the deadly virus via the world’s air transportation system”, he said. On Wednesday, a senior Spanish official told a parliamentary committee in Madrid that the government of Spain was “taking seriously” discussions in Internet forums linked to the Islamic State about using biological weapons against the West. Francisco Martínez, who is Spain’s State Secretary for Security, told the Committee of the Interior in the Spanish Congress that online commentators connected to the Islamic State have been discussing the possibility of using Ebola as a weapon against America and its Western allies. He told Committee members that the discussions had been taking place on Internet forums as recently as mid-September. He also cited “a series of tweets” from last July, in which another Islamist group, Ansar al-Islam, with roots in Iraqi Kurdistan, proposed using “deadly chemical products from laboratories” as means of launching attacks against the West. Martínez did not provide further details on the allegations.

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org
Files released last week by Britain’s National Archives have brought to the fore interesting new clues on the history of intelligence operations in the 20th century. One of the files relates to Migel Piernavieja del Pozo, a Spanish journalist in his mid-20s, who arrived in the United Kingdom in 1940, ostensibly to cover British public attitudes to the war in the continent. Britain’s counterintelligence agency, the Security Service, also known as MI5, placed Pozo under surveillance, after the debonair Spaniard proclaimed in public meetings that he was grateful for German Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s support to Spain’s royalist forces and said he hoped Germany would emerge victorious from the war in Europe. The agency was right to do so, as Pozo eventually approached an agent of the Abwehr —Nazi Germany’s military intelligence agency— in the UK, and told him that he too was working secretly for Berlin. But the Abwehr agent, codenamed GW in MI5 documents, was in fact a double spy for the Crown and managed to pass deceptive information to the Spaniard. Eventually, Pozo gave GW a tin of talcum powder containing over £3,500 in banknotes, which is approximately $150,000 in today’s money. Professor Christopher Andrew, official historian of MI5, toldThe Daily Telegraph that the money supplied by Pozo was “probably the largest sum yet handed to a British agent” by a rival spy. Eventually, Pozo’s inability to acquire useful intelligence in the UK prompted his recall back to Spain.

Another set of files, also released last week by the National Archives, appears to show that C.A.N. Nambiar, a friend of India’s first prime minister and deputy to one of the country’s most fervent pro-independence activists, was a Soviet spy. Nambiar was known as an old comrade of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first elected leader of post-colonial India, who dominated Indian affairs for much of the last century. He was also a close associate of Subhas Chandra Bose, a pro-independence activist considered a hero by Indian nationalists, whose hatred for India’s British occupiers led him to side with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the early 1940s. After India’s independence in 1947, Nambiar worked as a diplomat in Berne, Switzerland, before becoming India’s ambassador to Sweden and later to West Germany. But according to MI5 documents released last week, an Eastern Bloc defector fingered Nambiar in 1959 as an agent of Soviet military intelligence, known as GRU. The source said Nambiar had been recruited while visiting the USSR as a guest of the Soviet state in 1929. Read more of this post

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org
A court in Spain has quietly shelved charges against two French spies who were caught in Barcelona with a custom-designed sniper rifle. The two men were detained in the Catalonian town of Manresa in April of 2002. The Audi car in which they were riding was stopped at a checkpoint manned by members of the Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalan regional police, who promptly searched it. In the back of the car, police officers found a large PVC tube that contained a sniper rifle complete with a laser telescopic light and a silencer. The two men carried French travel documents identifying them as “Christian Piazzole” and “Rachid Chaouati”. Piazzole’s documents were found to be false, and there were suspicions that Chaouati’s may also have been forged. Spanish authorities concluded that the two men, who admitted they were officers of France’s General Directorate for External Security (DGSE), were in Spain to conduct an assassination. In a words of a state prosecutor in Barcelona, the DGSE spies had come to Spain “to kill”. Their arrest prompted an emergency visit to Madrid of a high-level French government delegation headed by General Philippe Rondot, a former senior intelligence officer at the DGSE. Rondot told Spanish officials that the two men were “on a training exercise”. In October of 2002, the Spanish Ministry of Interior commanded the Office of the State Attorney General to grant the two French spies “provisional release”, based on the rationale that there had been no victims involved in the case. Piazzole and Chaouati were promptly released after Rondot provided personal assurances that they would return to Spain to attend their trial for illegal weapons possession in early 2004. The charges carried a maximum sentence of seven years. It was said at the time that, in exchange for the two spies’ release, Paris pledged to continue to assist Spanish intelligence in their efforts against the Basque separatist militants of ETA, and agreed to extradite a number of ETA members serving time in French prisons. However, soon after their release, Piazzole and Chaouati vanished. They were found to be in contempt of court after they failed to return to Spain for their 2004 trial, as agreed. Since that time, Spanish media have sought to solve the mystery of the two French spies, but have been met with a wall of silence from Spanish and French authorities. Read more of this post

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
A set of World War II-era British Foreign Office documents detail a highly unusual incident of a senior British spy, who was arrested in Spain for cross-dressing. The files, which were released this week by the National Archives, concern the case of Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke, a senior operative of British intelligence who served with distinction in Europe and the Middle East. In October of 1941, Clarke was traveling though Spain en route to Egypt, by way of the British colony of Gibraltar. His instructions were to maintain a low profile throughout his trip, during which he posed as a foreign correspondent for The London Times. In reality, he was carrying with him key naval intelligence addressed to the British high command in Cairo. However, soon after arriving in Spanish capital Madrid, Clarke was arrested for appearing in a busy street dressed as a woman. A frantic cable sent to the Foreign Office by the British embassy in Madrid mentioned that the intelligence officer had been detained after he had been found “in a main street dressed —down to a brassiere— as a woman’. According to the —now declassified— memoranda complied by the Foreign Office, Clarke had told his Spanish police captors that he was “a novelist” and had dressed as a woman in order to “study the reactions of men to women in the streets”. But the conservative police officials in Francoist Spain did not buy Clarke’s story, and decided to charge him with “engaging in homosexual behavior”. London, meanwhile, was trying frantically to ensure that Clarke was released before either Spanish or German authorities realized that he was a British intelligence officer. The Foreign Office cabled the British embassy in Madrid with direct instructions that “in no circumstances should it be revealed that C[larke] is a British [intelligence] officer”. Read more of this post

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
A lawyer representing the family of a KGB defector to Britain, who died of poisoning in 2006, has told a court hearing in London that the late spy was working for British and Spanish intelligence at the time of his death. Alexander Litvinenko was an employee of the Soviet KGB and one of its successor organizations, the FSB, until 2000, when he defected with his family to the United Kingdom. He soon became known as a vocal critic of the administration of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2006, Litvinenko came down with radioactive poisoning soon after meeting a former KGB/FSB colleague, Andrey Lugovoy, at a London restaurant. Speaking at a preliminary court hearing on Thursday, in light of an upcoming British government inquiry into Litvinenko’s death, Ben Emmerson, QC, said that the late Russian spy was a “registered and paid” asset of the Secret Intelligence Service. This is not the first time that Litvinenko has been linked to the SIS —known informally as MI6— Britain’s external spy agency. Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, made similar claims to the British press in January of this year. But yesterday’s testimony by her legal team provided the public record with further revelations about her husband’s connections with British intelligence. The court heard that Litvinenko received a regular stipend from MI6 either in cash or via electronic transfer and that he had been provided with an encrypted telephone, which MI6 used to contact him on a routine basis. The night before his poisoning, said Emmerson, Litvinenko had met his MI6 handler, who went by the operational alias MARTIN. Read more of this post

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
It began late last month, and nobody seems to really know why: one after another, the most popular pro-al-Qaeda websites around the world have been going off the air, in what appears to be coordinated fashion. For most of the past decade, a host of al-Qaeda-linked websites have acted as online platforms of outreach, propaganda, and communication between the group’s sympathizers around the world. Most fulfill the role of conduits for al-Qaeda’s media production arm, as-Sahab, as well as for al-Fajr Media, al-Qaeda’s online distribution network. These two outfits routinely rely on a collection of websites to deliver online content ranging from glossy periodicals to audio speeches and digital videos. But on March 23, two of the largest pro-al-Qaeda websites, Shamukh al-Islam and the Ansar al-Mujahidin Arabic Forum, simultaneously disappeared from the World Wide Web. Two days later, another popular site, al-Fida, also vanished. By March 30, two remaining pro-al-Qaeda forums had also gone off line. Two sites, the Shamukh al-Islam and the Ansar al-Mujahidin Arabic Forum, reappeared, but offered no concrete explanation of the reasons why they went off the air in the first place. Interestingly, nobody has claimed responsibility for the disappearance of the pro-al-Qaeda websites, and the US government has refused to state whether its operatives had been engaged in undermining them. But CNN’s Security Clearance blog contacted Brandeis University researcher Aaron Y. Zelin, who offered one possible explanation. Read more of this post